How to maximise SSD performance with Linux

Now that SSDs have moved into the realm of affordability, there's little reason not to use one for your next PC, if you're not already using one. But Linux, as with Windows, has spent decades being tuned for spinning platter drives and while performance is noticeably increased when using an SSD under Linux, there are a number of tweaks and filesystem changes you can do to make the most of your SSDs.

Filesystem layer

The first of these is easy to do and can both improve performance and, more importantly, the longevity of your SSD by reducing unnecessary writes (keeping in mind the memory used in SSDs has limited write-rewrite cycles).